People Before Profit blog

Deporter in chief: Not the Obama I voted for

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 13:27:00 +0000

A recent headline reads "U.S. steps up deportation of Central American migrants." Is this the response of the Obama administration to the humanitarian crisis on the southwestern border? The president said he wants to streamline the deportation process so that tens of thousands of helpless children could be sent back to their countries of origin. This is a monstrous, inhuman policy that is sending children to their deaths. This is not the Obama I campaigned and voted for.

Obama is capitulating to the most foul racism in the land. Racists, the white supremacists who oppose the brown and largely Indigenous masses crossing the border, are "shaking in their boots" at the mere thought of demographic change. Why is Obama siding with a racist minority?

He is even to the right of many Republicans in this crisis. Case in point, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has indicated he supports many of the children being housed in that state. Yet, Obama wants to send them back.

His record on the immigration issue is shocking: throughout his presidency he has been quietly, but with great alacrity and efficiency, deporting over 400,000 undocumented immigrants a year. Does he want to show he has no compassion for people of color? No compassion for children?

Recently, this journalist saw a news report of a family who lived in Minnesota until their visas expired and they were deported. Back in Honduras the father, who was victim of attempted extortion by criminal gangs, was killed. Obama in deporting thousands has already condemned thousands to grisly deaths.

So far this year over 52,000 children have crossed the border, vast numbers of whom are Indigenous youngsters, speaking neither English nor Spanish, mostly from the Central American republics of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. All of these countries have large Native Indian populations, with Guatemala having a huge Native majority.

By the most recent statistical information on the migrants, 37 percent came from Guatemala, 30 percent came from Honduras and 26 percent from El Salvador. Why are these children, mothers and teenage females leaving their homes and risking life and limb (keep in mind that countless numbers die on this perilous journey each year), riding on the tops of freight trains, many walking for hundreds of miles across deadly desert terrain with little food and water, risking abuse and death from bandits and other assorted hazards, all to get to the U.S.?

What has been missing from the mainstream media newscasts of the mass migration is that U.S. imperialism is responsible for the border crisis, going back decades, in its installation and maintenance of barbaric, monstrously brutal right-wing military dictatorships that have, in the name of "anti-communism" killed tens of thousands of their own citizens with impunity. These proxy armies were armed to the teeth by the U.S. government. Life in these countries, because of U.S. plunder of their resources, most recently due to the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements, has degenerated to the point that thousands are pouring out of their homelands in a desperate attempt to find a refuge from the life-threatening maelstrom imposed on them .

A classic example is Guatemala, as it is no coincidence that the majority of emigres are from that long-suffering and beleaguered nation. In 1954 a CIA-engineered coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. The result - spiraling political repression, crushing poverty of the peasantry and working masses, and racist persecution of the Maya Indian majority - brought a horrendous, bloody civil war to the country that raged from the early 1980's to the Peace Accords of 1996. This journalist was in Guatemala along with several hundred other Natives from throughout the hemisphere, in 1991, in support of the Maya insurgency, and saw first-hand the results of American military handiwork - the attempted genocide of the Indigenous majority - over 200,000 killed more often than not with the most sadistic, medieval barbarity. The U.S. from 1954 onward supplied the gore-encrusted armies of the right in Central America with all the latest military hardware to butcher and slaughter its own citizens.

Pro-democracy forces in most of Central America have been brutally and barbarically suppressed due to U.S. military and political support of the most backward, feudal-minded elites and their military henchmen. Life for ordinary citizens has become untenable.

In early July on a Sunday news affairs program, a Catholic bishop from El Paso, Texas, said the border crisis was like " a house burning and people jumping out of the windows." For Obama to send children, mothers and teens back is akin to throwing them back into the burning house to their deaths.

In mid-July prominent news commentator Cokie Roberts said the government "can't send the kids home, this would be preposterous." Yet, Obama wants more power to deport helpless, suffering children.

In recent days mothers with children - 33 minors aged 6 months to 15 years and 26 mothers - were sent back to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. This is considered the most dangerous city in the world. Details of the deportation were sketchy, leading one to believe laws were violated.

The current law, the Wilberforce Act, holds that children, particularly from Central America, can't be quickly sent back. The law mandates that immigrants, particularly children, cannot be summarily deported when they are from non-contiguous nations.

News reports indicate Obama wants to have the law changed to allow the Border Patrol to make decisions to send the children back swiftly. This is a humanitarian crisis and Obama proposes a plan to eliminate the victims! Obama has been getting a free ride for too long on too many issues from progressives and the left. This has to stop, in particular on this issue.

At one time there was talk of a presidential moratorium on all deportations. He should issue an immediate presidential moratorium to stop the mass deportations and ensure the beginning of fair treatment for all émigrés.

Photo: A group of immigrant mothers and children from Honduras and El Salvador who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, as they are stopped in Granjeno, Texas, June 25. Eric Gay/AP

Why LeBron’s return brings joy to Ohio

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 16:24:00 +0000

As an Ohio native, I have to admit I got a little teary eyed when NBA basketball star LeBron James announced he was returning to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers. I wasn't the only one. Celebrations erupted across Ohio and people danced and openly wept on street corners.

James will be returning to a team for whom he played his first seven years professionally after graduating high school as a basketball prodigy. His departure four years ago to play with the Miami Heat understandably upset his fans.

The Cavaliers have a core of young talent, and his addition instantly makes them a championship contender. The last title won by any professional sports team from Cleveland was 1964, when the Browns won the National Football League championship. I still vividly remember listening on the radio while charting the plays on a pad of paper on which my father had drawn the replica of a football field.

Normally, such news wouldn't have affected me much. The NBA is a global multi-billion-dollar business, team owners are billionaires, and many players are multi-millionaires and change teams often. The Cavaliers will profit handsomely from this and Lebron is due a big payday.

But both sides of my family have deep roots in the area. Like LeBron I was born in Akron, and grew up in Northeast Ohio, spending the majority of my early years there. I can relate to many of the things that drew him back - his identification with the region, the people and their history, his friends, family and fans.

LeBron, for all his millions, is also still that "kid from Akron" with deep working class roots and sensibilities, shaped by the region. He's in tune with what people are thinking and going through.

The millions who reacted with joy to his return were not responding to his celebrity status alone. For many working people and youth, his return offered a ray of sunshine, something to identify with and be proud of in the face of seemingly endless economic stagnation for working class communities across the state.

Team sport identity has been a big part of working class culture for a long time. Many early industrial towns boasted sports leagues, with teams made up of workers from different factories. It's no accident the Pro Football Hall of Fame is in Canton, Ohio.

Economic stagnation has affected the area since the mid-1970s when steel, auto and other basic manufacturing began shutting down, throwing millions of workers on the scrap heap and turning the entire region into the "Rust Belt." Manufacturing dropped 20% between 1970 and1985.

Akron was once known as the "Rubber Capital of the World," where one-third of all tires produced in the U.S. were made. The deindustrialization process began earlier in Akron, when the rubber factories started leaving in the 1960s for rural areas and developing countries as corporations chased lower wages.

The factory shutdowns led to long term mass unemployment and a massive growth in poverty in all the industrial centers in the Midwest. Shutdowns hit African American workers hardest and consequently African American communities, which today experience sky-high unemployment and grinding poverty.

Most of the new jobs are low-wage, non-union jobs. For example, after the steel mills closed in Youngstown, the new growth industry became private prisons. At one point there were as many prisoners as there used to be steelworkers, and prison guards were paid low wages.

Thousands of workers became economic refugees and settled elsewhere, sometimes thousands of miles away. Families were separated and communities frayed.

Working class communities and in particular Cleveland and its African American community became the epicenter of the home mortgage fraud crisis. Homes were boarded up, abandoned, and neighborhoods destroyed.

In the Midwest, the class and democratic struggle is historically rawer and more direct than in other parts of the country. Solidarity arises from everyday experiences in a bitter class struggle and is passed down as family and community lore. The kind of identification and solidarity LeBron showed for Northeast Ohio with his return is what working people know in their bones.

This solidarity includes the unemployed fights of the 1930s, the 1936 sit-down strike to organize the rubber factories in Akron that build the United Rubber Workers, (which preceded those in Flint, Michigan), the Little Steel Strike in Youngstown that helped build the United Steelworkers union.

This history has all along been intertwined with the fight against racism and discrimination in employment, promotion, housing and education, in particular for the African American community.

It stretches back to the Underground Railroad, the abolitionist Ohio universities like Oberlin and Antioch, the struggle against discrimination in employment and to desegregate schools and housing. In 1967 Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city.

Over the past 30 years Ohio has also been a center of the bitterly contested battle against the extreme right wing and their corporate backers. The state has been a battleground in election after election to block efforts to roll back worker and voting rights. The defeat of Senate Bill 5, which would have stripped public workers of the right to a union, and the defeat of voter suppression bills were recent victories.

In all of these fights labor and African American unity was a vital aspect of the victory.

This is the Ohio that LeBron came of age in. To his credit he is not only a great basketball player but outspoken politically, rare for a professional athlete. He campaigned for President Obama during the 2008 elections, was one of the first NBA players to call for the ouster of Donald Sterling, the racist owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and led his former team, the Miami Heat, in protests against Sterling, the Trayvon Martin killing and racial profiling. He's played an active role in the NBA Players Union, and even considered running for president.

So here's to hoping LeBron and the young Cavs win a championship and bring some joy to Northeast Ohio. I'll join the celebration when they do.

Photo: LeBron James in 2009. Keith Allison CC

Vivan los Carwasheros!

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 14:32:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - The city's first union carwash caravan took place here July 24. Fifteen drivers brought their cars to Highland Car Wash on N. Figueroa Street in the L.A. neighborhood of Highland Park, situated between Downtown and Pasadena, off the 110 freeway.

The idea was sparked by a proposal from Susan Gosman, delegate to the L. A. County Federation of Labor from the California State Employees Association (CSEA) Retirees Chapter, and yours truly, representing the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981 Southern California Chapter), who floated the idea to Flor Rodriguez, an organizer for the Clean Carwash Campaign, supported by the United Steel Workers and other unions.

What if carwash union supporters all paraded to a specific unionized carwash at a specific date and time, to show support for the carwasheros (for the Spanish-impaired, those are the carwash workers)? And also to support the owner, still relatively rare among a small but ever growing group of 19 carwash locales in L.A., and another three in San Diego, which have agreed to unionize their shops.

Rodriguez and her fellow organizers loved the idea. For all the carwash places they've picketed and boycotted over the years, this provided the opportunity to thank and recognize a forward-looking owner who sees the rightness of guaranteed wages and benefits.

I spoke with Ban, the young woman who owns Highland Car Wash, and she said it's much better now. There's more teamwork now, and everyone knows what to expect of each other. It's not such an adversarial relationship as before.

Unionized carwasheros under contract now receive minimum wage (which in California is now $9) plus 2 percent. Their health care is covered by St. John's, a local hospital and medical care center. And now that many of them will be staying with Highland for a longer term, Ban already has her eye on several employees she'd like to promote. Most carwasheros probably do not see this as a lifelong profession, but for some it may be the only work they can find for a while. Now they have authorized break times, lunch times, set hours, and a staff lounge. It's about basic respect.

Even slightly above minimum wage is a huge victory for the carwasheros. Although undoubtedly there are decent carwashes to work for, many still pay no wages at all. Workers there rely on tips alone. And at many carwashes, owners top off tips, and steal wages by having workers sit around off the clock until the first car of the day drives in. That's called wage theft, and this is a business that lends itself easily to it, especially considering that a certain percentage of workers are undocumented. There is a bill pending before the L. A. City Council to ramp up the penalties on employers who steal wages.

The caravan gathered in a park only a few blocks from the carwash. There the drivers decorated their cars with posters reading "Union=A Better Carwash," "Viva Highland Carwash," and "Follow Me to a Union Carwash." They also used crepe paper streamers, balloons, and white window paint for additional signage promoting the union. Rodriguez's seven year-old son Frankie painted "#1" on his mom's car, which led off the procession,

Ban greeted all the drivers, and the expressions of thanks went back and forth. She granted everyone in the caravan a $5 discount on whatever service they requested. We knew in advance that tips would be shared among all the carwash workers, which is not, by the way, necessarily standard practice--it varies from place to place.

And for everyone--caravan drivers, workers, and owners--the Clean Carwash Campaign set up a table with snacks and homemade lemonade.

Participants came from CSEA, National Writers Union, L. A. County Federation of Labor, AFSCME, United Teachers Los Angeles retiree chapter, Workmen's Circle, and the Communist Party. The campaign made ample use of twitter, Facebook, and other social media to spread news and photos of the expedition to Highland Park.

The thought is now to promote a monthly caravan to different union carwashes in town, and develop a following, like the peripatetic gourmet food trucks that have become an L. A. icon. Stay tuned for more carwashero news!

Photo: Eric Gordon/PW

Video: Barber calls for “Moral Fusion” movement to defeat far right

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 12:53:00 +0000

All labor activists and progressive people should watch and circulate this remarkable speech by the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, to the recent Netroots Nation conference (NN14). The speech, which lasts an hour, makes a powerful, inspiring appeal to build a mass, grassroots "Moral Fusion" movement to defeat right wing extremism on all fronts. Barber has led the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina and beyond, which has mobilized tens of thousands against the right wing efforts in his state to suppress voting and deny low income people access to Medicaid as well as other democratic rights and issues. The movement has spread across the South and now he is calling for building it beyond the South.

Photo: Thousands express their anger at Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and the GOP's extreme right agenda during a Moral Monday rally, July 1, 2013, Raleigh, N.C. Tim Wheeler/PW

How do we get out of this mess?

Fri, 25 Jul 2014 17:05:00 +0000

Below is a section of the keynote to the Communist Party USA 30th National Convention, June 13-15, 2014, delivered on the convention's opening day by outgoing National Chair Sam Webb. The newly elected national chair is John Bachtell, who previously served as Illinois organizer for the party.

This article discusses the second of six challenges for the party and progressive movement. (See previous articles here and here.) We will feature other keynote sections in the coming weeks.

- Editors

Challenge 2: An economy that works for working people

The 99 percent aren't faring too well. Are you?

The economic recovery is anemic; and things don't look good going forward.

In fact, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, wrote:

"But what if the world we've been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?"

In making this claim, Krugman is arguing that contemporary U.S. capitalism, while still governed by the same underlying laws of motion and dynamics and still dominated by powerful corporations, isn't like its mid-20th-century predecessor. And he's right.

Let me explain:

Present day capitalism, which began to take shape in the early 1980s, bears little resemblance in important ways to its forerunner in the years stretching from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In that era, U.S. capitalism (as well as the other core countries in the capitalist zone) registered remarkable growth. Prosperity was broadly shared. And capital accumulation out of which come corporate profits took place largely in the sphere of material production.

Now and then interruptions in this process occurred, but they were short and followed by a resumption of production, rising living standards, and accumulation on a broader scale.

But this changed in the mid-1970s. Capitalism's robust and near continuous expansion over a 30-year period gave way to stagflation, that is, high inflation, slow growth, a weakening dollar in international markets, and declining profits in an increasingly integrated world economy, notable for its concentration of economic power and wealth in the hands of a few hundred globally organized corporations and fierce competition/rivalry on a state and corporate level.

Unhappy with this turn of events on a global as well as a domestic level, but fully resolved to overcome the new barriers to capital accumulation, profit maximization, and economic growth in this new economic environment, the moneybags in the corporate suites decided that U.S. capitalism's "golden age" was over and, accordingly, switched gears:

First, they declared war on labor. And what a war it was and still is. They extracted massive concessions from workers in the unionized mass production industries; they closed factories and slashed payrolls; they downsized, restructured, and rationalized industries and workplaces; and they deployed new technologies to replace and speed up labor.

But this was no more than the opening act of a long-running play. They also loosened a good chunk of their money from its old moorings in the sphere of material production and said to it: "You are free. Go wherever you want. Multiply many times over. Make me rich many times over."

Which is exactly what their now footloose and profit-seeking money did.

It moved into new lines of production as well as real estate, land speculation, sports teams, art, and luxury living.

It fled to other regions and states where wages were low and labor unprotected.

It also chased after, as Naomi Klein has written, natural disasters, where it profited handsomely off people's tragedies.

It circumvented as well as broke down trade barriers as well as claimed intellectual property rights on everything from seeds (stolen from farmers and indigenous peoples) to medicines to new technologies.

It also licked its chops for a moment and then got down to the business of privatizing public education, Social Security, health care, public housing, water provision, and public land and resources.

But the main place surplus capital flowed was into financial markets and channels.

In fact, the flow was so massive and sustained that it became the main factor shaping the contours, structure, interrelations, and evolution of the national and world economy.

But, as we know now only too well, this enormous flow of overwhelmingly speculative, parasitic, and non-productive money into the financial sphere, while pumping life into an under-performing economy for longer than most of us expected, was anything but an unmixed blessing.

Sure a few people on Wall Street or connected to Wall Street got rotten rich, lived in unconscionable luxury, and accumulated enormous social power to affect events and outcomes on the national and international level.

But most of us here (as well as elsewhere) got spanked, and spanked hard, especially when the financial feeding frenzy finally unraveled and the whole economic edifice collapsed in 2008. We lost jobs, income, homes, and family farms. Piled up debt so we could get by. Did nothing but worry about the future of our families and communities. And if we were a person of color or a woman, the impact was calamitous. Poverty became even more racialized and feminized.

And to think that not one, not even one, of these thieves of high finance spent a day in jail.

To make matters worse, five years later, things are no better for us. Nearly all of the income gains during this time have gone to the 1 percent. And the prognosis for the economy is more of the same - slow growth, stagnation, and mounting contradictions.

What gives added force to the stagnation pressures are the vast changes that have occurred in the global economy since 1980.

On the one hand, at the apex of the economy are huge multinational corporations and banks.

And, on the other hand, Marx's reserve army of the unemployed, underemployed and informally employed has doubled in size since the 1980s.

The scale of this absorption of workers into wage exploitation has radically re-leveraged the relative positions of capital and labor in favor of the capitalist class.

What is more, this disparity in wealth and power at the core of the economy constitutes a new and powerful source of downward pressure on the U.S. and world economy.

Now this whole turn of events and reconstitution of U.S. and global capitalism could not have happened without a major assist from the capitalist state (governmental bodies, courts, instruments of violence and repression) and the political class.

Of crucial importance were the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the ascendancy of the right that followed. This political grouping was the hammer in this transformative process.

But to be fair, the Democrats, and especially the Clinton administration, were not bystanders either. They also had a hand in transforming the economy to the advantage of the 1 percent and Wall Street.

So the question before us is: How do we get out of this mess?

Here's my two cents:

What's needed is nothing less than the restructuring of the economy in a consistently and deeply anti-corporate, and eventually socialist direction.

First: The conversion of a fossil fuel driven and militarized economy into a peaceful, sustainable one, based on and developing renewable energy sources.

Second: Major infrastructure construction and renewal.

Third: A guaranteed and livable income for all, and a reduction in the workweek with no cut in pay.

Fourth: Major expansion of every aspect of the public sector - education, housing, recreation, culture, childcare, retirement security, health care, elder care, and so forth.

Fifth: Strengthening of workers' rights and people's rights generally.

Sixth: Turn "too big to fail" banks and the energy industry into public utilities.

Seventh: Measures to overcome longstanding inequalities and rebuild hard-hit communities.

Finally: Controls on capital's ability to abandon communities and move around the world.

Of course such reforms will be met with the refrain: there is no money!

But that is perhaps the biggest of the Big Lies.

In the past few decades, trillions of dollars of unearned wealth has been amassed by the 1 percent - this should be transferred into public hands.

Another huge source of funds is the reordering of governmental priorities away from military spending.

Finally, taxing of financial flows and transactions should get our radical economic program off and running.

And let me add this: The purpose of such a reform program isn't to "level the playing field" or to insure that everyone who "plays by the rules" and works hard, gets a shot at the "American Dream."

To the contrary, the purpose is to decisively change the rules and tilt the playing field in favor of the underpaid, the underemployed and the unemployed, the struggling family, the discriminated against, the woman who combines wage labor at unequal pay with the lion's share of unpaid household labor (not least of which is child and elder care), the indebted student, the underwater homeowner, the bankrupt city, the underfunded school, every victim of capitalism's crisis and its irrational priorities.

But where do we begin? My answer is that we begin where we are, that is, with the existing movements and struggles.

And there are so many! Starting with the growing movements against economic inequality, the low-wage economy, and right-wing extremism.

One day it is AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka passionately speaking against the growth of inequality.

The next day it is President Obama making a speech on the same subject.

The books of Thomas Piketty and Elizabeth Warren, both on the subject of glaring and unjustified inequality, are on the New York Times best sellers list.

A progressive bloc in Congress stands firm behind economic, gender and racial justice.

The minimum wage movement is really kicking up sand, the latest victory the vote by the Seattle City Council to lift the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Meanwhile, around the world, powerful movements, and in some cases, even governments, especially in Latin America, are demanding economic justice.

And before we move on, as a former altar boy, I got to bring the Pope into the conversation, who said, and I have to quote him:

"While the earnings of the minority are growing exponentially, so, too, is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. The imbalance is the result of ideologies, which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. ... A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. ... The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything that stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule."

Powerful stuff! Like Lebron James, the Pope's got game!

One of the most compelling struggles against economic inequality, maybe the most compelling, is the low -wage worker organizing campaign.

Who are these workers? Well they are us. They are young as well as old, black and brown as well as white, women and men, immigrant as well as native born, suburban and rural as well as urban, and, I'm sure, gay and straight. They also come from red states as well as blue states.

In their corner are important sections of the U.S. labor movement, including the top leadership of the AFL-CIO.

We (and many, many others) are supporters of this struggle. But at this convention we should agree to up the ante.

I say, let's decide here, right now, at this 30th convention of the Communist Party to make this struggle a strategic focus.

Can we agree to that?

Such a focus, in case anybody is worried, isn't a turning away from the traditional sections of the working class. It's not a back benching of our industrial concentration policy, which by the way was never intended to create a pecking order within the working class; to the contrary, its purpose was to activate, empower, and unite the working class as a whole.

Thus, a focus on Walmart, fast food, and other low-wage workers is an adaptation of our concept of industrial concentration to new realities and challenges. This doesn't mean that people in Michigan should forget the autoworkers, or in California the longshore workers or in ... you get the gist.

Now I'm also sure someone is thinking that low-wage workers don't have the same strategic power that, say the autoworkers in Flint had in the winter of 1935.

I would counter with three observations. First, strategic power doesn't turn only on location in the capitalist economy. That strikes me as too economistic. It also is about relationships, outreach, alliances, creative forms of struggle, unity, and, not least deepening class and democratic consciousness.

Second, the victories of low-wage workers will bring new spirit, ideas, power capacity and confidence to labor - traditional and non-traditional.

And, third, the organization of low-wage workers will augment manifold labor's ability to organize the millions of workers who are unemployed and underemployed.

Can labor ignore this reality? NO.

Can we? Same answer!

Can we make a full-blooded turn toward the struggles of low-wage workers?

Great! Sounds like everybody is on board.

Ok!

Photo: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (based on a WPA photo by John E. Allen), CC 2.0 generic)

My family pays rent, not a mortgage

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 16:02:00 +0000

When the Great Recession began in 2007 a majority of working people felt it; and, as the law of politics dictates, thus was born their activism, their cause. Shortly thereafter a series of events occurred, including the housing bubble burst later that year and the stock market crash in 2008. All of this was caused primarily by the hands of finance firms, lending banks and government and Federal Reserve regulators that acted in complicity by either standing idle or collaborating. This is all history now.

And, so, a movement was born. These well-meaning people championed and advocated for the rights of homeowners against criminal and unethical lenders, against fraudulent foreclosures, student loan debt, repelling Citizens United, the movement to label GMO foods, third party advocacy, legalizing marijuana, getting back on the gold standard and a myriad of different causes, some related, others not so much.

Families, having enjoyed the chance of purchasing a house, sending their kids off to college, working in and living a middle-class American life were now almost suddenly losing it all.

Many began being sympathetic to the growing Occupy movement. Or they joined the Tea Party or the Libertarian Party. Or they started following Ron Paul and the libertarian movement. People became political.

Several in-depth documentaries were produced on the Great Recession, such as Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story," "Inside Job" narrated by Matt Damon, "Too Big to Fall" and "Collapse." Several books and articles were written in response to this including Richard Wolff's "Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism," Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism" and "No Logo," among others.

Much to the credit of most critical journalists, thinkers and activists, a vast majority of people began focusing their attention to the robbed homeowners, the scammed mortgage-payers, the disillusioned American dreamers, the disenfranchised middle-class.

But what of those that never owned a home during the Great Recession? What of those that didn't have a home to lose? What of the working poor permanent renters?

My family has never owned their home. And they most likely never will. We've been apartment dwellers for all of my life, 31 years. A truth that hits hard but over the years has settled into a sad truth.

Through the 80s and 90s and now well into 2014, each month, they don't pay a mortgage. They pay rent. They work-and by they, I mean my mom. My dad's company, Precision Dynamics Corporation, a California-based identification wristband manufacturer, was one of the hundreds of companies that has offshored, or outsourced its departments to other countries with less regulations and a lower wage standard. He worked out of their San Fernando location.

Prior to the recession, when I was still living with my family, we rented a two-bedroom apartment in Van Nuys, a poor-to-working-class neighborhood with random pockets of suburban corners. We were there shortly after I graduated high school and began going to Los Angeles Valley College, a local community college. We were evicted after it was found out that my younger brother was a gang member and rumors were spreading that he was allegedly selling drugs. In spite of evidence or an investigation, our landlady promptly gave us our eviction notice and we, then, moved into another apartment in the same neighborhood. But significantly pricier. There was no way of avoiding this. We had a fixed rent of around $500 since my family had been living there since I was a baby, a total of more than 20 years. My brother and I shared a room and my parents and two baby brothers shared a room. It was a small place but we made it work. When we all moved into the next apartment I didn't have to share my room - unfortunately, it was due to the fact that my younger brother was in-and-out of jail and prison for the next several years.

I eventually moved out and thus began my own trail of renting apartments.

This is the story of a majority of working poor people in this country. People that lived paycheck-to-paycheck. They entertain the idea of one day owning their own home, but know better. Although their education is limited, they know basic math. And if you're pulling in $10-an-hour job, and so is your wife or husband (if you're lucky enough to have one), raising two, three or four kids, collectively pulling in $50-to-$60,000 a year, paying off the inevitable debt that plagues the poor, you simply can't afford a home.

The banks and lenders will sometimes lie and say that you do and give you a high-risk loan, a well-documented fact that happened to thousands of people in the U.S. who had the courage or determination to attempt in taking part in the American Dream. But my family didn't. We knew better than to dream.

It's one thing to be working poor and it's another to be working poor in one of the wealthiest counties in the nation: Los Angeles County. Similar to Christian Gabriel's article in trying to find the American Dream in New York City, the high-cost of living and rent (or mortgage) in a costly city such as Los Angeles is disastrous.

Los Angeles County is ranked as one of the world's largest economies, with a GDP larger than Switzerland, Sweden and Saudi Arabia, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. Additionally, as one of the most populated counties in all of the U.S., the cost of living is significantly higher than a lot of places in the country. Naturally, LA County has the highest number of renters than any other part in the nation. A direct result in the rising cost of homeownership, more county residents turn to renting as the cheapest alternative with the median price for a three-bedroom home in LA County being $417,333, according to an LA Times article which used 2013 fourth quarter reports by RealtyTrac, a real estate information company.

So it makes sense. You can't afford a $300,000 home so you rent. According to Curbed Los Angeles, a real estate and neighborhood news website, the mortgage on a three-bedroom house would be $1,987, which is $100 more than it would be to rent a similar home. It's more realistic, being poor and working, to rent. Plain and simple.

As a first-generation college graduate of Mexican descent, my parents are proud. I'm the oldest son. The second to graduate from college, a B.A. in journalism. I've had amazing internship experiences with non-profits and news companies. I'm enjoying the position of communications and outreach coordinator for a social justice non-profit, Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace. My younger brother also graduated from college, and one brother is in the Marines and the other just got accepted to my alma mater, California State University of Northridge. We're on the right track but our economy, our system, doesn't put people like us in the position of homeownership, of economic affluence and stability.

For the working poor, the American dream is far removed, a distant promise that many immigrants were lured by. But more and more Latino immigrants have given up on this, on the idea of buying a home, according to an article by New American Media. In fact, several real estate agencies, such as Viventa and Union Andina in New York, are using this to their advantage and renting apartments to Latino immigrants and advertising the ability to buy cheaper houses in their home countries.

When my parents and I talk about owning a house, which is less frequent than ever before, what is becoming more plausible is returning to Mexico, to our hometown of Jerez, Zacatecas, and owning a home there.

This idea of owning a home is not American; it's universal. It's meant to be understood as an heirloom, something that can be passed down from generation to generation. A purchased home to a new family, a new generation, offers the privilege of not having to pay rent or a mortgage. But as most dreams, it's a reality that only exists as an idea.

But from the family-unit idea of a home, maybe it's OK for that dream to come to an end. Instead of looking at homeownership as something between a small selection of individuals, perhaps a better idea is collective homeownership and living. Instead of an average small four-member family living in a home, it could be two or three multiple families all sharing one house, one mortgage, making one home. Instead of looking at a house as an individual family heirloom to be passed down, it can be reinterpreted as a viable method for collective living.

As our turbulent economy continues to rise and dip, it makes more sense to re-examine several things, for the sake of survivability.

Photo: A typical apartment building of the older neighborhoods in the City of Los Angeles (downtowngal/CC).

Turn away from death and destruction

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:48:00 +0000

It has been a horrible week of death and destruction.

As of today more than 640 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,000 have been wounded in the escalated Israeli assault on Gaza. Most of the dead are non-combatants, many are children, in some cases whole families, according to the United Nations. Meanwhile rockets continue to be fired from Gaza into Israel reaching as far north as Israel's largest city, Tel Aviv, sending residents into shelters. So far 27 Israeli soldiers have been killed during the Gaza re-invasion, and two Israeli civilians and a foreign laborer in Israel have been killed in rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza. Several Israelis have been reported injured as a result of the rocket attacks. There is fear and terror on all sides.

But the death and destruction is not equal.

Israel has a sophisticated Iron Dome air defense system (funded by the U.S.), and its residents have fled the rockets into shelters. But Gaza has no such defenses and in the tiny, densely populated strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea coast there is no place to hide. On Monday the New York Times reported (in an early version of this article; the sentence was later removed): "The Israelis seemed to be stepping up artillery shelling in the central Gaza refugee camps of El Bureij and El Mughazi, where they had earlier urged people to evacuate."

Gaza officials report that 132 Palestinian children have been killed since Israel's assault began July 8. In one 24-hour period at the start of this week, 28 children were killed. "It's clear from the insane amount of children killed over the past three days that children are bearing the brunt of Israel's offensive," Ivan Karakashian, from Defense for Children International - Palestine Section, told the Palestinian news agency Ma'an. "To be honest, we have never seen it this bad for children."

Also last week, tension in conflict-ridden Ukraine reached a new fever point and 298 people died a horrible death when their civilian airplane was shot down over the eastern part of the country. Many of the victims were AIDS researchers and advocates on their way to a conference. Who did it is not known. Many are accusing pro-Russian eastern Ukrainian separatists of being the perpetrators, but they in turn blame the Ukrainian military.

In both regions, an already fraught situation reached a new kind of meltdown, with ordinary, innocent people paying a terrible price.

Meanwhile in Iraq, more than 5,500 Iraqi civilians died by violence in the first six months of this year, with more than 1,500 killed in the past month, as the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and allied groups ravage swathes of that unfortunate country.

Next door, thousands of Syrians have been killed as ISIS and other unsavory groups battle for power. More than 700 were killed in just two days last week.

Libya is devolving into civil war. It has many aspects of a failed state. The airport in the capital, Tripoli, is closed and is being shelled daily by rival fundamentalist militias.

Sadly, our government bears a heavy responsibility for all these horrors.

The violence in the Ukraine is the result of U.S./NATO provocation over the past decade or so, in an effort to gain political and especially economic influence in the former Soviet region. Experts warned that such actions on Russia's doorstep were likely to provoke tensions, and they were right. Instead of using the airplane shootdown tragedy to promote peace and diplomacy, the White House, evidently bowing to right-wing Republican pressure, is continuing a confrontational approach toward Russia.

In Iraq, the U.S. occupation put in place a sectarian system of self-interested power brokers who have not hesitated to use religious and ethnic conflict to advance their narrow interests with help from reactionary regional powers. This was fine with our government as long as a regime was in place that cooperated with U.S. corporate interests The Obama administration is evidently pursuing a similar approach

In Syria, our government worked with reactionary Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others to arm questionable rebel groups - with the aim of installing a more compliant Syrian regime. Now we are seeing the bloody consequences both there and in Iraq. Yet the White House is planning to send more backing to increasingly extremist Syrian rebels.

And the administration is largely silent about the disastrous situation in Libya, where U.S./NATO military intervention toppled the Ghaddafi regime in the name of democracy.

The horror in Gaza is the result of the failure to resolve the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is now widely acknowledged that the Israeli government sabotaged the most recent peace effort promoted by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, by continuing to announce settlement construction in the Palestinian West Bank. This was a deliberate slap in the face to the Obama administration. But what is the U.S. doing in response? Not much, it seems.

Now we've had a series of provocations - kidnappings, murders, vengeance attacks, rocket firings, air assaults, invasions - that enable the Israeli right to keep on blocking a peace agreement and establishment of a viable Palestinian state. Our government provides some $3 billion each year to Israel, financing a 47-year illegal occupation and now an air and ground war that, according to Human Rights Watch, violates international human rights laws. With that $3 billion a year, the U.S. is the one country that has the ability to put a stop to the Israeli right's sabotage and obstruction and to compel Israel to move toward peace and a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It's time to do so.

The U.S. needs to rethink its partnership with reactionary Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It's time to stop fueling, funding and arming sectarianism and opportunist self-seekers in Iraq, Syria or elsewhere. It's time to stop seeing Africa, ravaged by poverty, civil wars and massive civilian displacement, as the "next frontier" for U.S. military and corporate influence. On the other side of the globe, it's time to draw back from fueling tensions in Asia with a military-oriented "pivot."

We need a different foreign policy. A foreign policy that puts the peaceful, equitable, collaborative, green economic and social development of the world's peoples before the "interests" of U.S. multinational corporations. But that won't happen unless there is mass public pressure from the American people. It means defeating the Republican saber-rattlers in Congress and making sure they don't get a majority in the Senate. It means strong voices from America's working class, its labor unions, its faith communities, people from every walk of life. It means organizing a broad movement with program and slogans that have wide appeal for Americans and that make the connection between peace and economic and social justice, abroad and at home.

It's time to push for peace and for a humane foreign policy that puts people before profits.

Photo: Palestinian medical personnel treat a wounded little girl at the emergency room of the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, July 18. AP/Khalil Hamra,

Cities becoming major actors in global trade

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 15:56:00 +0000

This past May, Chicago concluded an international trade agreement with Mexico City. The agreement sets out an ambitious economic partnership involving joint initiatives in trade, innovation, education, industrial expansion and enhanced global competitiveness. The project is described in detail in Brookings Institution documents by Amy Liu and Ryan Donahue. Here is a link to the actual agreement.

What makes it intriguing is that the agreement is tailored to the economic interests of each partner city, rather than, say, following the instructions of some broad geostrategic agenda defined at a federal level.

It goes far beyond a 'sister cities' pact to enhance the $1.7 billion in locally produced trade that flows between the two metropolitan areas.

According to the Brookings Institution, more than $1.7 billion of locally-produced products are traded between the two, making each city among the top North American trading partners for the other.

Of that trade, 38 percent is in advanced industries led by electronics, machinery manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals. About 130 Chicago-based firms, such as Abbott Laboratories, Baxter International, and Motorola Solutions, have opened operations in Mexico City, demonstrating how businesses have already acted on market opportunities there to access new customers or new suppliers. Furthermore, nearly 290,000 business travelers and tourists fly between Chicago and Mexico City per year, reinforcing the economic ties that bind them.

This Chicago-Mexico City partnership was inked at a forum in the Mexican capital sponsored by the Global Cities Initiative. The initiative, a Joint Project of Brookings and JPMorgan Chase, sets a new standard for how cities can work together, partially independent of the considerations foremost on the table of multilateral trade negotiations.

It is not surprising that the Brookings Institute evades the new possibilities for grassroots international labor, peace, immigration and environmental cooperation and solidarity in a city-to-city relationship. Business opportunity is its motivator. But wherever capital goes, labor will soon follow, as Frederick Engels noted.

Mexico City's Secretary of Economic Development Salomon Chertorivski Woldenberg, who led a delegation of officials and business leaders on an information-sharing visit to Chicago last week, envisions an ongoing and dynamic relationship between the two cities.

"For instance, [Mayors] Emanuel and Mancera, and their regional partners, can help small and midsized firms in priority industries find more customers in each market, expanding exports. To build on the momentum of reshoring to North America, they can streamline permitting and procedures to facilitate foreign investment, especially for firms interested in simultaneously locating and expanding in both markets. Their community colleges or universities can create a common training program to ensure a steady supply of skilled workers in both cities so firms in shared industries, like electronics and pharmaceutical manufacturing, are competitive in both markets."

Chicago and Mexico City have drawn on the examples of other recent enhanced "sister city" relationships and taken them to a new stage.

San Francisco's ChinaSF initiative has worked in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou to help 30 primarily high-tech companies set up U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, as well as help Bay Area companies make connections in China.

Arizona State University has deepened greater Phoenix's ties with Monterrey through an industry-focused partnership with Tec de Monterrey, which has led to joint master's degree programs in aerospace logistics and the creation of a Global Institute of Sustainability that examines cutting edge approaches to regional water management issues in both markets.

And the state of Queretaro has forged a partnership with global aerospace firms, such as Bombardier, and local universities in Mexico, Canada, and the United States to ensure their economic anchors have the skilled workers and supply chains to succeed across North America.

Cities are beginning to articulate a distinctive agenda in international affairs, one that sets them apart as diplomatic actors in their own right. The development is a golden opportunity for progressive agenda activists to create powerful and binding ties with movements in sister cities and have a direct impact on global economic forces.

The idea of nimble, confident city-regions forging practical partnerships to solve problems while lumbering, grid-locked, or corporate-captured nation states struggle to achieve traction on a range of issues, from Syria to climate change, has intuitive appeal. That it does!

Photo: In Mexico City, Mayor Emanuel signed the Global Cities Economic Partnership with Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera. Chicago Sister Cities.

Nadine Gordimer, Nobel laureate, activist, dies

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 15:37:00 +0000

JOHANNESBURG (AP) -- Nadine Gordimer was first a writer of fiction and a defender of creativity and expression. But as a white South African who hated apartheid's dehumanization of blacks, she was also a determined political activist in the struggle to end white minority rule in her country.

Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991 for novels that explored the complex relationships and human cost of racial conflict in apartheid-era South Africa, died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Johannesburg on Sunday. She was 90 years old. Her son Hugo and daughter Oriane were with her at the time, Gordimer's family said in a statement Monday.

The author wrote 15 novels as well as several volumes of short stories, non-fiction and other works, and was published in 40 languages around the world, according to the family.

"She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people, and its ongoing struggle to realize its new democracy," the family said. Her "proudest days" included winning the Nobel Prize and testifying in the 1980s on behalf of a group of anti-apartheid activists who had been accused of treason, they said.

Per Wastberg, an author and member of the Nobel Prize-awarding Swedish Academy, said Gordimer's descriptions of the different faces of racism told the world about South Africa during apartheid.

"She concentrated on individuals, she portrayed humans of all kinds," said Wastberg, a close friend. "Many South African authors and artists went into exile, but she felt she had to be a witness to what was going on and also lend her voice to the black, silenced authors."

Gordimer struggled with arthritis and rheumatism but seemed to be in good spirits when they last spoke three weeks ago, he said.

"Our country has lost an unmatched literary giant whose life's work was our mirror and an unending quest for humanity," South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, said in a statement.

Prof. Adam Habib, vice-chancellor and principal of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, described Gordimer as a "revered intellect."

During apartheid, Gordimer praised Nelson Mandela, the prisoner who later became president, and accepted the decision of the main anti-apartheid movement to use violence against South Africa's white-led government.

"Having lived here for 65 years," she said, "I am well aware for how long black people refrained from violence. We white people are responsible for it."

Gordimer grew up in Springs town, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Britain and Lithuania. She began writing at age 9, and kept writing well into her 80s.

She said her first "adult story," published in a literary magazine when she was 15, grew out of her reaction as a young child to watching the casual humiliation of blacks. She recalled blacks being barred from touching clothes before buying in shops in her hometown, and police searching the maid's quarters at the Gordimer home for alcohol, which blacks were not allowed to possess.

That "began to make me think about the way we lived, and why we lived like that, and who were we," she said in a 2006 interview for the Nobel organization.

In the same interview, she bristled at the suggestion that confronting the human cost of apartheid made her a writer.

"If you're going to be a writer, you can make the death of canary important," said Gordimer, a small and elegant figure. "You can connect it to the whole chain of life, and the mystery of life. To me, what is the purpose of life? It is really to explain the mystery of life."

She said she resisted autobiography, asserting that journalistic research played no part in her creative process.

"Telling Times," a 2010 collection of her nonfiction writing dating to 1950, offers some glimpses of her own experience. She wrote in a 1963 essay of a meeting with a poet giving her an idea of a life beyond her small hometown and her then aimless existence.

Gordimer's first novel, "The Lying Days," appeared in 1953, and she acknowledged that it had autobiographical elements. A New York Times reviewer compared it to Alan Paton's "Cry the Beloved Country," saying Gordimer's work "is the longer, the richer, intellectually the more exciting."

She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for "The Conservationist," a novel about a white South African who loses everything.

Among Gordimer's best-known novels is "Burger's Daughter," which appeared in 1979, three years after the Soweto student uprising brought the brutality of apartheid to the world's attention.

Some readers believe the family at its center is that of Bram Fischer, a lawyer who broke with his conservative Afrikaner roots to embrace socialism and fight apartheid. The story is salted with real events and names - including Fischer's. The main character is a young woman on the periphery of a famous family who must come to terms with her legacy and her homeland.

Her 1987 novel, "A Sport of Nature," prophesized the end of apartheid and included a liberation leader based on Mandela.

"Gordimer writes with intense immediacy about the extremely complicated personal and social relationships in her environment," the Nobel committee said on awarding the literature prize in 1991.

In her Nobel acceptance speech, Gordimer said that as a young artist, she agonized that she was cut off from "the world of ideas" by the isolation of apartheid. But she came to understand "that what we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place."

After the first all-race election in 1994, Gordimer wrote about the efforts of South Africa's new democracy to grapple with its racist legacy. She remained politically engaged, praising South Africa for the progress it had made, but expressing concern about alleged backsliding on freedom of expression.

"People died for our freedoms," Gordimer, who had had works banned by the apartheid government, told The Associated Press in a 2010 interview. "People spent years and years in prison, from the great Nelson Mandela down through many others."

Associated Press reporter Malin Rising contributed to this report from Stockholm.

Photo: Nadine Gordimer at the Göteborg Book Fair 2010. Creative Commons 3.0. Bengt Oberger.

Blocking right-wing power grab the priority in 2014 elections

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 13:50:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - Blocking the right-wing Republican power grab is the number one priority of all progressives in the Nov. 4, 2014 elections.

Yet mainstream pundits opine that the race is already won by the Republicans. The way they crunch the numbers, there is no way the Republicans can lose. These inky prognosticators predict the Republicans will pick up the six seats they need to gain majority control of the Senate making Kentucky's grumpy Mitch McConnell the new Majority Leader.

Start with the money. According to the website, "Open Secrets," McConnell, now the Minority Leader, has a war chest stuffed with $21.7 million to smooth the way to his reelection. His Democratic opponent, Alison Grimes, has $8.1 million. How can Grimes hope to overcome such an enormous gap?

Yet all the evidence is that McConnell is running scared, that a huge upset could well be in the making in the Bluegrass State.

Check the Cook Political Report's latest monthly report.

Most revealing in the Cook report is the number of "toss up" Senate races: eight. That shows that despite the lopsided Republican advantage in money, the GOP is far from assured of victory.

Similarly, in the House, where all 435 House seats are up for grabs, and the Republicans currently hold a 17-seat majority, Cook rates thirteen races as "toss ups." The actual number of undecided races will grow in the weeks ahead as voters ponder the grim result of GOP-instigated gridlock in our nation's capital.

The outcome will be decided by voter turnout. If voters turn out as they did in 2008 and 2012, the Republicans will be swamped. That is why repeal of the Voting Rights Act and voter suppression dirty tricks are so crucial to Republican hopes of stealing the 2014 election.

They are counting on a repeat of the 2010 debacle in which low turnout handed majority control of the House to the Republicans.

The GOP House promptly shut down the government. They blocked extension of unemployment benefits. They prevented passage of President Obama's job-creating stimulus package that would have created two to three million jobs while repairing or rebuilding the nation's crumbling bridges, schools, and power grid. They slashed Food Stamps and Medicaid. They waged endless war against Obamacare. And now they have launched a lawsuit against President Obama, a maneuver dripping with racism.

The election-year dirty tricks are on full display. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) sent out a message July 14 signed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, warning, "Friend, these deadlocked polls say it better than I ever could....Karl Rove just funneled $20 million worth of brutal attacks into six must-win Senate races---exactly how many the GOP needs to take control....This is DANGEROUS and could give the Republicans an insurmountable advantage. If the Republicans win and take over the Senate, Medicare will be dismantled, Social Security will be raided, and abortion rights will be stripped away."

In five key states - Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, Arkansas, and Colorado - Republicans are in a dead heat or narrowly trailing the Democratic candidates. This means the Democrats can win every single one of these races if the coalition of labor unions, African Americans, Latinos, women, and youth is fully mobilized. Labor is of critical importance since the AFL-CIO and its allies have millions of members. Carl Rove's money machine is pumping anywhere from two and a half million to five and a half million into each of these key races.

The real key in all these races is turnout and part of the challenge is convincing voters that their ballot will make a difference. In her eloquent report last January to the National Committee of the Communist Party USA, Joelle Fishman, chair of the CPUSA Political Action Commission, said that the Party and Young Communist League "can help determine the outcome through mass struggle which changes consciousness and alters the public discourse and through voter registration, education, and turnout."

Some of those mass struggles are the movement to increase the minimum wage from its current $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour. In Seattle, for example, Mayor Ed Murray and the City Council have already approved a $15 minimum wage.

Comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship was approved by the majority Democratic Senate. But it is blocked in the Republican-majority House. Fishman points out that if this legislation had been approved and signed into law, the current shameful, racist offensive against refugee children from Central America would not be raging, instigated by the most reactionary Republicans and a few Democrats as well.

The outcome of the Nov. 4 election is yet to be determined. Rising American Electorate (RAE), a group that played a big role in helping turn out youth, single mothers, low income workers, and other disenfranchised people to reelect Obama in 2012, warns that 21 million of these RAE voters "are not committed to vote this year."

Our job is to convince those millions to vote as if people's lives depend on it.

Photo: Despite an overwhelming lead in the money department, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell appers to be running scared in the battle against Democrat Allison Grimes, his challenger. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

A month in my home country: What a trip!

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 15:34:00 +0000

BERLIN - What a trip! I had last visited my American home country three years earlier; during my visit last month I saw that some things hadn't changed much, some things had. As ever, piled high, were many contrasts and contradictions.

My first goal was my class reunion (the 65^th!!!), partly in the Harvard Yard, sober and dignified even when filled with thousands of new graduates, proud parents, alumni and alumnae.

Honorary doctorates were awarded on the one hand to personalities like Aretha Franklin but then, on the other hand, to George H.W. Bush!

Among my fellow alumni (as ever always polite and friendly even to a heretic radical like me), clear differences were reflected. After all, Harvard traditions range from an early president like Increase Mather with witch trials, or Lowell with the fatal Sacco and Vanzetti decision, to courageous men like Henry Thoreau, W.E.B. Du Bois and John Reed.

At a symposium one alumnus defended the so-contrary incomes of billionaires and the working poor as OK, another decried "cheaters" using food stamps but taking "Caribbean cruises." Both views were politely but decidedly rejected by the majority.

After the quiet streets, varied churches or the pleasant clapboard houses of the Boston suburbs, which I had unconsciously missed in Germany, I landed in the middle of Manhattan, lucky enough to have a good cousin with a 37^th floor apartment not far from Times Square.

What a contrast! The din of hooping horns, traffic whistles and an ear-shattering blare of police cars, fire engines and ambulance sirens overwhelmed my unaccustomed ears. I descended into the maelstrom: surging tourist crowds and countless men and women serving them: pushing bus, boat and bike tours, fetching taxis for luxury hotel guests, luring people to an astounding variety of international restaurants, cafes or holes-in-the wall. Men of all nations sold fruits, drinks, frozen yogurt, hamburgers, franks and other delicacies, some kosher or halal, some not, tempting, aromatic, probably anything but healthy.

The health relevancy of certain other, later services remains as ever controversial. I observed those busy clearing garbage and the streets and saw, too, some sad relicts who could work no longer, the losers in a mad, noisy, ever-hastening race to make out, to move upwards - or simply to survive.

Appalling to me was the increase in commercialism, more than three years ago, I felt. Even the old New York Times building where I once cheered the descent of the bright New Year's symbol was full of varied advertisements to its very peak! And, not only in the theater district where I was living, I was engulfed by shiny ads assuring me that their musical was the funniest, or most gruesome, but of a certainty the best on Broadway! All were out of my range, in available time, above all in ticket price. When I lowered my sights and hunted for a movie on 42^nd Street I could not find one which attracted me. It was the wrong week, I fear - nothing but horror or heavily-armed adventure. I knew there was better fare, but somehow not there and then. In 25 years since the demise of the East German Democratic Republic I have had time enough to get used to advertising and commercialism, but downtown Manhattan surpassed everything!

Other aspects contradicted the negative impressions, above all the wonderfully mixed character of the people. I saw those of varied European descent, the many, many African-Americans, those of Latino background with a dozen melodious dialects, people from East Asia or from the Indian sub-continent, with their gradually westernizing apparel, from saris to jeans, from tall Sikh turbans to reversed Yankee baseball caps. Was I imagining it or, even more than on earlier visits, were people mixing less self-consciously across differences in color, language and religion. I had a pleasant little hint of it in Somerville near Boston when a young African-American hastened to catch up with me and share his umbrella during an unexpected downpour!

Another plus: the traffic-reduced, greener, less commercial stretch of Broadway. And, better yet, my pleasant morning in Central Park, especially in that wild and wooded section, The Ramble, where I learned to love birding 70 years ago and now rejoiced to see old feathered friends I had truly missed in all those years in Germany - even common ones like robins, blue jays, grackles, a catbird, a downy woodpecker and that beautiful bird which had been my wife's favorite, the bright red cardinal.

A clearly political note

Then, on a more clearly political note, there was the annual Left Forum, this year with more than 5,000 participants, including me with a panel contribution (in competition with forty other panels at the same time). But more on that later.

All in all, while New York had much that repelled me, I still found a close attraction to this amazing city where everyone, or nearly everyone, spoke my language and I was no longer "the fellow with the funny American accent." Ah yes, in the deeper regions of my heart this was still my home town - or at least one of my two home towns.

From there it was on to Washington, where I was to give another talk to a small, quite mixed and interesting group. It was arranged in the friendly home of a couple where I stayed - people who have spited very difficult years, due to their politics, and who proved to be perhaps the most fascinating, knowledgeable people on the whole trip. That is saying a lot, for I met a host of intelligent, knowledgeable, very friendly people. Washington, though the temperature was hotter than in New York, was less crowded, less noisy, even pleasanter. But then, Congress was not in session! And here, too, were oases within the city limits; my host showed me the wonderful, green and hilly Arboretum.

Especially moving for me in Washington was an exhibition in the Smithsonian American Art Museum of paintings by Ralph Fasanella, who had been a volunteer with the Lincoln Battalion in Spain (a subject I devoted a book to). He never took art lessons but simply painted the world around him, especially that New York of years long past which was part of my own background.

He stressed simple, hard-working people, their joys (including baseball) and tribulations like those of his father, who, with minimal reward, toted heavy ice blocks to pre-fridge homes. His later works, with many symbols and allusions, showed the growing pressures of the McCarthy years which had determined my own life, the death of the Rosenbergs, which had hit so hard even in my new home in far-off East Germany. His last painting, "Farewell Comrade/End of the Cold War," mourning the defeat of socialist ideals stretching back to Eugene Debs, Jack London, John Reed, the women of the Lawrence "Bread and Roses" strike, the Russian Revolution - hit close enough to evoke a few bitter tears.

At my next destination, Milwaukee, I saw a fine exhibition of the art of Vassily Kandinsky in the beautiful modern museum there. But great and important as he was, I guess I am too old-fashioned or conservative in my tastes to be moved by his colorful works. I have never decried painters (or composers or poets) who may be revolutionary in their art but tell me little about the world I know. Yet, I cannot help it, my heart belongs to those like Fasanella, who advised: "Remember who you are. Remember where you came from. Don't forget the past. Change the world." Those who are near Washington before August 4^th can see - and judge for themselves.

Another contrast was provided by the weekly Jazz in the Park in Milwaukee, a joyous occasion with thousands on blankets or beach chairs enjoying (or sometimes defying) the very loud music. How different from the Pops Concert in Boston in dignified Symphony Hall. I confess to leaving both before the end; in the case of the Pops my yawns and heavy eyes were caused (somewhat) less by the music, not exactly my favorite genre, than simply by the effects of jet lag.

Milwaukee provided more contradictions. Nearly forty percent are African-American, yet a great majority at Jazz in the Park was, surprisingly, white! My computer says that discrimination between communities is still a big problem there. Yet the Methodist church service I attended with my host was not only a mix of colors but rejected all racism and antipathy to newer immigrants. This though the pastor was himself least of all an immigrant - being partly Native American.

Happy to visit

I was happy to visit the Turner Society, founded in 1855 by refugees from the German revolution of 1848-1849 with principles of "Liberty, against all oppression; Tolerance, against all fanaticism; Reason, against all superstition; Justice, against all exploitation!" Those revolutionaries helped elect Abe Lincoln and were largely responsible for a Socialist congressman and three Socialist mayors. And I met some who honored Mathilde Franziska Anneke. A skilled horseback rider, she herself took part in the fighting in Baden in 1849 before fleeing to Milwaukee, where she was a leader in the fight against slavery and for women's rights. Somewhat better known today is heroic Mildred Harnack, a leftist literature expert from Milwaukee who married a German student at Madison and was secretly active in resisting the Nazi dictatorship. Caught by the Gestapo, she was sentenced to six years in prison. Then Hitler had her sentence altered; she was beheaded by the guillotine on February 16^th 1943. Her last words, reportedly, were: "Ich habe Deutschland auch so geliebt" ("I loved Germany so much").

No tragedy was involved with another German-American hero of mine: Baron Friedrich Wilhelm August von Steuben, whose noble "von" title was invented by his grandfather, whose high rank of Prussian lieutenant-general was invented by Benjamin Franklin (to impress Washington and the other colonials), whose gay orientation was discreetly overlooked - and who played a crucial part in forming the army which defeated the British. Milwaukee boasts a proud equestrian statue of him.

In Madison I admired a more modest little monument, dedicated to other courageous fighters; volunteers from Wisconsin in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain. I thought again of Fasanella.

But I must not overstress military actions, justified as they then were. Indeed, a very hopeful impression I received on my trip was: most Americans have had more than enough of war. There may be relatively little knowledge of distant events - the media stresses weightier matters like the loves or crimes of celebrities or warns of dangers from a dark-skinned Obama and other "Muslims."

Yet most Americans, it seemed to me, now want their hard-earned money or the taxes thereon spent for needs closer to home, often very desperate. I read that 21 percent of Milwaukeeans exist under the poverty line - over 30 percent of those under 18. Such issues cannot be swept aside, and Wisconsin is facing a hard fight to rid itself of a key perpetrator, its Governor Walker. I also found that Milwaukee has a hard-fighting black Congresswoman, Gwen Moore, who recalls the spirit of those two great German-American women, Mattilde Anneke and Mildred Harnack!

I was brought face to face with today's problems when I needed to fill a doctor's prescription for insulin. In Berlin this costs 5 euro. The pharmacy here wanted $350!! Luckily, I am insured and will soon get my money back. How many Americans cannot yet say the same? And what do they do?

For me, it has always been hard to escape politics. So I felt very much at home at the Left Forum in New York, with its hundreds of panels on myriad themes and speakers like Harry Belafonte, Angela Davis, Cornell West and Kshama Sawant, the young woman, a socialist, who won a seat in the Seattle City Council in connection with the fight for a $15 minimum wage. At the Forum was a big, enthusiastic crowd with mixed backgrounds and languages but closely-related purpose. Surprisingly optimistic, many were searching, yes, yearning, for some forceful combination of the many splintered progressive groups and goals in the USA, from "Oust Walker" groups in Wisconsin and "Moral Monday" rallies in Raleigh to the growing fight of miserably underpaid workers at fast food and major retail giants, and including those brutally exploited in a giant prison system or those torn from their families and deported to Central American poverty and violence - and all those opposing dangerous, aggressive interference abroad, from Cuba and Caracas to Kabul and Kiev.

One main speaker was Bernd Riexinger, co-chair of my Left party in Germany, Die Linke. He was a symbol of how a unified left, with its own party, could win influence - in this case 64 seats in the Bundestag - and pressure enough to force all other parties to move leftward, in words if not in deeds, in fear of losing out to growing dissatisfaction with the economy and opposition to involvement outside national boundaries. I also knew of all the problems, disputes and fissures within such a party and of constant pressure to dilute, weaken, or destroy it. But despite all attacks it remains a force that cannot be ignored! Other countries need not try to copy it, but it should and can serve as an inspiration and source of mutual solidarity.

Luckily, the homeland visit was not purely political. Despite a few unhappy hints of issues like racism, creationism, immigration and guns, my final week was spent happily in huge, arid, but incredibly beautiful New Mexico, with my wonderful relatives and astounding sights like the White Sands National Monument and the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, where my niece and I rejoiced in the sight of red-tailed hawks, wild turkeys, herons and egrets galore, a beautiful black and white avocet and countless tiny, amazing humming birds - a constant delight unknown in Europe.

These last peaceful and relaxed days strengthened me for the cramped flight over the Atlantic, the confused, hasty swap of planes in that ghastly airport Heathrow, and a return to an accustomed but by no means boring life in my second home town of Berlin.

Photo: Commercialism remains a salient feature of the midtown Manhattan area. Wikipedia (CC)

My father, Southern Baptists, and the battle for the soul of America

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 13:18:00 +0000

My father was a music minister for many years before he became an educator. In his and my mother's accounts, the Southern Baptist congregations he served were too often torn by dissension.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Once he became a layman, although still a song-leader in churches we attended, my father witnessed with deep concern changes in the SBC starting in the 1970s. A growing conservative element purged seminaries of perceived liberals, and even moderate leaders found themselves fired or pushed into retirement. Dissenting churches left the SBC to form other fellowships.

My father, a lifelong conservative Republican but a moderate Baptist, voiced to me his fear that the core concepts of "priesthood of believers" (equality of members, pastors not overly empowered) and local autonomy of churches were being ignored by the new leadership.

What happened with Southern Baptists and like-minded fundamentalists has occurred on a larger scale with American politics.

It used to be that the 50-yard line of the political game was where compromise happened.

Liberal Republicans helped pass the Civil Rights Act, while conservative Democrats in the South, whose bigotry sharply limited access for African Americans, did back the GI Bill and some social reforms.

It wasn't an ideal situation and many problems remained, but it seemed that the wheels of progress were moving forward. Then the wheels started coming off. Conservative Democrats, whose cultural amnesia kept them from honestly approaching the racism of our past and present, swung more and more to Republican candidates.

Reagan Democrats were in the main conservative Protestants and Catholics who decided they could co-exist with country club Episcopalians, after all.

The midfield stripe of compromise moved further right, just as had happened with the Southern Baptists. Republicans, having claimed the Southern white core, nailed down the electoral numbers and appeared to have won the patriotism battle.

It didn't matter who served in the real wars during this time, who paid the tax bills and saw their bridges unrepaired, whose wages sank and whose values were questioned - if you were a certain kind of Christian voter concerned about where your country was headed, the Republican Party had an easy, pulse-racing response:

Vote for the GOP and to hell with compromise.

The 50-yard line began shifting further right. Just as moderate and liberal Baptists fled the SBC, a similar flood occurred with the political parties until today you see a rough match-up in the electoral map between the 1950s and 2012 - you have but to reverse the reds and blues.

And yet. There are born-again Christians in the Democratic Party. Some atheists remain in the Republican Party. It's easy to shoot out windows in a Democratic campaign office or write hate mail to a Republican as long as you think "they" have nothing in common with you.

I campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008. That election represented my sincere effort to approach the compromise point in politics. During that time, a passerby saw on the back of my Jeep a Texas Tech license plate frame and an Obama bumper sticker. He was stunned by this and asked how I could be both a Red Raider fan and an Obama supporter. We respected one another; we didn't cast stones. I imagine him reporting me to his wife. "You would not believe what I saw today."

The 2007-2008 financial meltdown saw a few morally suspect people bankrupt the country in the course of enriching themselves, while millions of often spiritually upright Americans saw their savings and lives wrecked.

Sinful liars in sober suits sold upwardly hopeful families a bill of goods - and got away with it. You could almost write a parable about it, but there's plenty along that line in religious texts already.

All those families stuck with underwater mortgages were ignorant or unlucky-this is the narrative of conservative media. Bad breaks happen. Nothing to see here. Move along.

And yet. The people who lost everything and who struggle today - they have been sinned against, if you want to adhere to the letter of the (religious) law.

As an adult, I converted to Judaism. I know well the various controversies in my adopted faith. No religion, no spiritual pursuit is free of human ego and doctrinal disputes.

But when I see politicians like Rand Paul, who espouses the beliefs of arch-atheist Ayn Rand, try to mix that toxic brew with Christian rhetoric, it appalls me. My father visited people in jail and tithed money to the church - admittedly to the detriment of his struggling family - and he was also for civil rights during a hostile time. To the end of his life, my father, who in retirement became a pastor to rural churches, stayed the course with his faith. His faith was expressed through songs and through action.

It is one of life's ironies that the political system known as socialism is pictured in this country as being anti-religion, when it is anything but.

You'll find many core principles of religious faith in the words of socialist writers - the difference being that God is in the details, not on the billboard sign.

What's in the heart doesn't always fit the stereotype on either side of the political divide. We have many names for the Almighty, and many paths that people choose to take, or not take, toward that ideal.

The battle that some on the right think is going on - and you have only to watch their media outlets for examples - isn't between the godly and the godless, nor is it, as some on the left would have it, between the apostles of greed and fair play progressives.

It's about what we do. I might consider myself to be a faithful Christian, but if I also helped cause massive pollution of drinking water in West Virginia, my faith didn't stop me from doing harm to others.

A Hindu could be the surgeon who saves your life. Her faith is crucial to her, but it's a detail. Her action is what matters for you.

The soul of America is what you find when people strive to make it a better, more equitable place. That great Irving Berlin song is both a request and a promise: God, bless America. Please. Bless it as we, the faithless and the faithful, seek a greater union between those who struggle in low-wage jobs and those who hide their wealth in off-shore bank accounts.

Because if you love this land, then you do something to make it better. For you, it might be a voter registration drive. Or being more helpful to people in the course of your work. Tipping more. Joining movements. Observing boycotts. Opposing wars. You'll find ways to make a difference, both by yourself and with others.

And may I strive in my own life to be more like my father, who blessed America, the first year of integration, by volunteering to drive the school bus into a poor minority neighborhood. He chose love over hatred.

God in the details, but America in action.

Photo: Highway 287, between Memphis and Childress in western Texas. cobalt123 CC

Reflections on the Communist Party convention

Thu, 10 Jul 2014 11:37:00 +0000

Recently the Communist Party USA held its 30th National Convention in Chicago. In all, nearly 375 delegates and guests convened over the weekend of June 13-15 to affirm the Party's strategic policy, hold panel and plenary discussions, conduct workshops and outline new areas of organizational focus - namely, broadening and building the movement of fast-food workers for $15 an-hour and a union, and redoubling our efforts in the struggle to avert climate catastrophe through global warming.

The convention was an impressive event showcasing the party's depth of work throughout the movements for social and economic justice. Not only was it a uniquely diverse gathering - multi-racial, young, old, gay and straight - it was also a uniquely working class gathering.

As I mingled with contingents from across the country, the uniquely working class character of the convention became apparent. I was introduced to union leaders and officers, organizers and rank-and-file activists, grievance and bargaining representatives, fast food and home health care workers, among many others.

The array of grassroots working class leaders was truly impressive, signifying the party's connection to and membership among the people on-the-ground doing the grunt work of building a movement.

I would even go so far as to argue that the working class, largely union based delegates and guests represented the thinking of tens of thousands - if not hundreds of thousands - of other working class activists and trade unionists in many of the unions now leading the charge against the global 1 percent.

Another unique quality of the 30th National Convention was the number of new members attending their first convention.

From Portland to Denver, from Orlando to Atlanta, from St. Louis to Detroit and New Haven to New York, new members attended. Their participation at the convention and going forward helps to insure the party's continued leadership role in developing a new generation of activists and organizers ready to confront the challenges of tomorrow.

As thousands of new members apply to join the party every year, it is incumbent upon us to not only celebrate our proud 95-year history, but to develop, train and mentor the up-and-coming Party members so that they can lead us into the next 95 years.

Furthermore, a number of guests joined over the weekend, including some well-known leaders in the national fast-food movement.

Undoubtedly, this convention was a convention of grassroots movement leaders. It was a convention broad in scope, new in composition and transparent in deliberation.

In fact, the transparent deliberation and planning for this Convention included a broad swath of party members from across the country. In all, hundreds of members proposed workshops, worked in committees (on resolutions, the constitution, culture, and panels, etc.), stuffed letters into envelopes, volunteered at the Convention, contributed discussion documents and participated in the vibrant online pre-convention discussion period.

The 30th National Convention of the Communist Party, USA also elected a new National Committee, new national officers and a new National Chair, John Bachtell, all with the full confidence of the entire party.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the work and leadership of our former National Chair, Sam Webb, who stepped-down - along with other officers like Jarvis Tyner, Juan Lopez and others - at the convention to make room for a new generation of party leaders.

The courage and confidence that they have put in the entire party, the new NC and the new national officers is indeed humbling. We have big shoes to fill, as Sam, Jarvis and Juan all consistently and persuasively lead the charge for a more open, vibrant, youthful and grounded Communist Party of the 21st century.

Undoubtedly, the convention had some minor bumps along the way, as well as during the weekend of June 13-15. Some feel - and I agree - that we tried to do too much, that there wasn't enough time to casually make new friends and reacquaint ourselves with old ones. And of course, we needed more coffee.

However, in its totality, the 30th National Convention of the Communist Party celebrated during its 95th Anniversary was a convention for the ages, working class in character, new and diverse in composition and transparent in deliberation.

Photo: PW

Football trademark decision suggests path to bring back outsourced jobs

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 13:17:00 +0000

On June 18, 2014, the United States Patent and Trademark Office canceled six registered trademarks which it had previously granted to the Washington football team for its name. The ruling said the name is "disparaging to Native Americans."

It is critically important to note that the Patent and Trademark Office has the power and authority to both grant and rescind when that license is used to injure people of this country. Patents and trademarks are not a god-given right. They can only be obtained from the U.S government. They are a protection against theft or infringement of ideas, inventions or logos. When a corporation operating under protection of a U.S. patent grant ceases production in this country, it is "disparaging" and destructive to the working people of this country who granted the patent in the first place.

When a company takes its production overseas, it violates the trust and good will of the American people. The Patent and Trademark Office cancelled the Washington football team's trademarks because these trademarks are disparaging to Native Americans, thus they are disparaging to all people in our country. Similarly, when a U.S. company outsoursces its jobs, it is injurious and disparaging to all workers. Therefore, like in the decision of the Washington football team, patents should be rescinded from corporations which move their production abroad. In such cases, (as I wrote in an article on January 2, 2013) "any entrepreneur or the government or a combination of the two could manufacture those products in the U.S." The threat of rescinding patents could be the lever to move runaway companies to bring many of the 6-million out-sourced jobs back home.

Furthermore, issuance of new patents should be done under new conditions. First, all production under these patents should be done in the U.S. for the duration of the patent. Second, the public interest must be protected: If such new products result from the use of U.S. taxpayer funds, then the public should receive an appropriate share of the profits.

The injured parties in the Washington football suit brought legal action to correct the injury. This could be a useful tool for unions and other people's organizations to open a struggle to reverse and rescind run-away patents.

Photo: Texas machinists protest outsourcing of jobs. goiam.org

Child refugee crisis: battle for America’s soul

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 13:03:00 +0000

Since 2011, the number of "unaccompanied" children, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has been skyrocketing. Already since October 2013, 52,000 have arrived, and the total may reach 90,000 by December 2014.

Republicans and the right claim that this surge in child migration is caused by the Obama administration's "lax" immigration enforcement policies, like the DACA program - Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals - started in 2012. This program suspends deportation and grants work permits to undocumented people who arrived with their families when they were children, who came before 2007 and who have not reached 31 years of age. Otherwise, the Obama administration's immigration policies have not been "lax" at all, with record numbers of deportations. Furthermore, children are also seeking refuge in other countries in the region including Nicaragua and Belize, which are very poor.

The right is using the child migrant crisis to re-ignite anti-immigrant fervor, and to embarrass the Obama administration. It has fomented "nimby" ("not in my back yard") demonstrations in Murrieta, California, and other places, creating a shameful spectacle of organized bands of right wing hate mongers attacking children. The administration has responded in part by calling for authority and funding to speed up the processing and deportation of these child migrants. This would be intolerable, and frankly, un-American.

While the situation is complicated and has many moving parts, throwing these children back into life-threatening circumstances is outrageous and wrong. What happened to the "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" ethos? Has the richest country in the world become so selfish, so arrogant, so ugly as to throw away children?

We cannot allow this to happen - or to let history repeat itself. We recall that in 1939 the Roosevelt administration caved to anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant sentiment and turned back a ship of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. These children are refugees too.

Recent studies by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and by independent researcher Elizabeth Kennedy illustrate the real roots of the crisis.

Both studies interviewed migrant children from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; the UNHCR study sample also included Mexican children. Only a few of the children mentioned the belief that they would get a legal permit to stay in the United States as a reason for migrating. Many more mentioned fears of violence in their home countries, from gangs, drug cartels, and in some cases corrupt and brutal police and military. Girls in particular expressed fear of sexual violence. Grinding poverty was also a major motivating factor. A large number stated that they were trying to reach parents living in the United States. Mexican teenagers also stressed recruitment pressure from human smuggling gangs.

This is a refugee and humanitarian crisis, not primarily a law enforcement crisis. As such, it falls within the purview of both U.S. and international law, which has to be adhered to. But most important is the principle that children must be protected and that this must be the primary consideration guiding U.S. policy. These considerations have caused immigrants' and civil rights organizations and some members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to balk at the idea of responding to the crisis by speeding up mass deportations of children, or changing 2008 legislation that requires special treatment for child migrants.

In our opinion, the principles the government should follow in dealing with the child refugee situation are the following:

*The children should be immediately protected under law and provided with adequate housing, food, health care and psychological counselling by qualified pediatric psychologists or social workers. A country that spends billions on wars can provide these resources if it tries.

*Hearings to determine eligibility for relief should take place over a sufficient time and should be carried out by people with child trauma expertise, and the proper language skills (including not only Spanish but indigenous language capacity; 48 percent of the Guatemalan child refugees come from indigenous communities according to UNHCR). Each child should have a guardian appointed. The UNHCR and the Kennedy study both conclude that a majority of the children they interviewed would probably have a cause for relief under international law.

*Children should not be returned to their countries of origin unless it can be shown that they are not being sent into a situation of mortal danger.

*Where parents or guardians of the children are living in the U.S., the children should be transferred to their custody, even if it means protecting the parents from immigration enforcement actions.

*The Obama administration should not be deterred by this development from implementing the idea of providing administrative relief for undocumented immigrants, since House Republicans have blocked legislative reform. Polls have continued to show that the American people reject harsh treatment of immigrants.

*The nations of Central America should be helped, not by sending them more guns or bullets or "training" for their corrupt police and military, but by implementing trade and aid policies that help their poor workers and farmers and not Monsanto and other agribusiness transnationals.

How we treat these children is a battle for the very soul of our country. We know which side we are on and hope you do too.

Photo: Child detainees play as others sleep in a holding cell. Eric Gay/AP

Every day, somebody new is raising hell

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 15:12:00 +0000

Below is a section of the keynote to the Communist Party USA 30th National Convention, June 13-15, 2014. It was delivered on the convention's opening day by outgoing National Chair Sam Webb. The newly elected national chair is John Bachtell, who previously served as Illinois organizer for the party. We will feature other sections in the coming weeks. (See first section here.) - Editors

I'm going to turn my attention to the main challenges that the leadership of the party would like to you to discuss, debate, and decide over the next three days. I will present them one by one for the purposes of clarity, but in real life each intermingles with the other in countless ways.

Challenge 1: People's surge

It seems like every day somebody new is raising hell, rattling the cages of the powers that be.

One day it's the Dreamers, the next day it's Walmart moms and fast food workers, and then the Moral Monday movement the day after that.

Then there are seemingly endless actions to increase the minimum wage.

There are also initiatives to stop deportations and the militarization of the border.

To this list, we have to add mobilizations against voter suppression along with ongoing campaigns to register new voters.

Nor can we forget the struggles to stop mass incarceration and overhaul a judicial system that is punitive and riven with racial and class bias.

Of great significance are the efforts to protect women's health and abortion clinics, which are under ferocious attack.

Then there are the inspiring student campaigns against global energy corporations, student debt and the Keystone pipeline.

And we should include in this surge the flood of phone calls that nearly overwhelmed the congressional switchboards to protest what looked like imminent U.S. military action in Syria.

Also of great significance was the transformative AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles last fall.

Still another impressive example of this surge was the landslide win of Bill de Blasio for mayor of New York City, who is a self-described progressive. The New York Times, no less, called it "a sharp leftward turn."

Then a few weeks ago, across the mighty Hudson River, Ras Baraka in another impressive victory was elected Newark's mayor.

Finally, an aspect of this surge that is so inspiring it brings tears to my eyes has been the passage of marriage equality legislation in state after state. These victories have become so common that it is easy to lose sight of the enormous change this represents and thanks goes to the courage and tenacity of the LGBT rights movement.

From this podium, let me in everyone's name tip our banner to the late Harry Hay, as well as to the pioneering Stonewall Generation that includes our own Gary Dotterman and Eric Gordon. The Stonewall generation came out when it was very difficult to do so; they battled and lost loved ones to the AIDS epidemic, and they never gave an inch to ignorance and hate.

If I could sum this surge up in a few words, I might say that things are breaking good, not "breaking bad."

Now I will be the first to say that this surge of struggle doesn't have the capacity to resolve the crisis of capitalism in a consistently democratic and working class manner.

But does it have transformative potential? Yes - it contains the seeds that could, if properly cared for, sprout and bring a "new burst of freedom," economic security, and peace.

Of course, a devil's advocate would quickly remind me of the barriers that make any kind of progress, let alone social transformation, unlikely.

And you know what? The obstacles are formidable; the task is daunting.

But we shouldn't lower our sights or lose those precious gifts called hope and desire or give up on the American people.

The present surge is real. And it can evolve into "a movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority," as a young Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto.

Which means that it reaches into small towns and suburbs as well as cities, into Lubbock as well as San Francisco, into the South as well as the North, into the heartland as well as the coasts, and into red states as well as blue states.

Or to put it differently, only a movement, as one progressive analyst wrote, that includes the desperately poor and the insecure middle class has any chance of success. This is not exactly a Marxist formulation, but framing it like that encourages big universe thinking and expansive tactics, both of which are sometimes lacking on the left and in the party.

(To be continued)

Photo: PW

Defeating the cycle of death in Israel and Palestine

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 16:21:00 +0000

A few weeks ago three Israeli settler teenagers were kidnapped while hitchhiking in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank. The youths were taken to a field and shot in the head. This has drawn a strong military response from the Israeli Defense Forces, and from Israeli settler extremists.

Palestinian youths have been attacked and killed - in one case a Palestinian youth was burned alive. And o nce again, following rocket firings from the Palestinian territory of Gaza, Israeli bombs are falling over Gaza. There, countless buildings are being destroyed as a densely populated area with no way of defending itself is bombarded by weapons of destruction from an army that it has no way of defending itself against. This adds to the humanitarian crisis within Gaza as well as the West Bank.

We must take a thoughtful look at what is going on here. You have a population - the Palestinian people - that has been occupied since 1967 by a foreign power that has declared itself a democratic state - Israel. On the other hand, you have the nation of Israel which was born out of the horrors of the Holocaust and is also a functioning democracy in the Middle East. It has been sovereign for more than 60 years. This is a complex, contradictory situation.

But certain acts of resistance to unlawfulness are not acts of resistance whatsoever.

Any assault on any civilian let alone the collective punishment of civilians because of what their government has done is not an act of resistance. It is an act of terror, which in this case is extremely detrimental to the Palestinian cause.

That is so even if one chooses to recognize their other forms of resistance against uniformed military occupiers.

The murder of the three Israeli teens has been condemned by the Communist Party of Israel as well as members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization itself, among a wide range of groups on all sides.

Unfortunately, we are already seeing the summary punishment and acts of vengeful destruction against the Palestinians being carried out by the Israeli armed forces and by extremist Israeli settlers. Pretty soon one could see Gaza reoccupied by the IDF. The Israeli military claims they're tired of the constant rocket fire from Gaza as well as terrorist plots emanating from there.

This is a quagmire that only benefits business interests who profit from war and conflict on all sides. It brings up the question of nationalism versus internationalism. Poor and working class Palestinians would benefit from uniting with poor and working class Israelis, realizing that they share a common history of being oppressed and abused by imperialist and chauvinistic powers. Reactionary terror and religious/ethnic chauvinism on either side are harmful to the ordinary people of both Israel and Palestine.

It would be good if these communities could unite and fight the very system that has scapegoated both the Jews and the Arabs from the 1940s until now. Such working class internationalism can break down the walls of reactionary nationalism and prejudice which serve as chains holding both peoples down. We in the United States should support any efforts toward this kind of unity between Palestinians and Israelis.

Photo: Israeli soldiers holding a blindfolded Palestinian man they arrested during their search for the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers, in the village of Beit Kahil near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, June 21, 2014. The three were later found dead. (AP/Majdi Mohammed)

Harris v. Quinn raises stakes for 2016 presidential election

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 15:50:00 +0000

The Supreme Court's latest assault on the Labor Movement - Harris vs. Quinn - shows how essential it is for Democrats to win the White House in 2016.

The 5-4 decision stops unions from collecting fees from nonmembers who provide home-care services through a government agency.

It seems like a narrow ruling, but it's a door opener for conservatives to eventually starve-out public sector unions. Under Harris, though workers receive the benefits and protection of a collective bargaining agreement, they have no obligation to help finance the union that makes that possible.

Unionized government employees - city, county, school district, state, federal, etc. - now comprise more than half of all union members in the U.S. And unions with public-sector contracts will certainly move aggressively to sign-up nonmembers.

Nevertheless, imposing a "right-to-work" protocol throughout the public sector could be next for Roberts and Alito. This would probably take more than one case and several terms. The court's future ideological balance - likely determined by the next president - will be crucial.

As expected, Harris has triggered interesting suggestions among labor academics and others for reforming how unions organize and operate.

Georgetown University's Joe McCartin, for example, wrote after Harris that unions "need to respond now by building wider and deeper public support for a new, community-based approach to collective bargaining, support that can withstand hostile court decisions."

He points out in Dissent that unions "are often only permitted to bargain around issues - pay and benefits - that make it easier for their opponents to portray bargaining as a win-lose proposition pitting unions against hard-pressed taxpayers." McCartin proposes what he calls a "common good" approach to bargaining which includes issues such as a community's quality of life, corporate tax breaks, tuition levels, minimum wage, etc.

Good ideas from McCartin, many of which are already happening. Substantial and remarkable strides have been made by unions in building broad-based coalitional strategies around economic justice and campaigns to raise wages for the working poor. The Los Angeles Labor Movement has been especially innovative and effective on these issues.

But that doesn't remove the immediate and intense threat posed by the court's current majority.

In California in 2012, unions mobilized to defeat Prop 32, which would have eviscerated Labor's political clout in the state. In 2016, the Labor Movement will again be fighting for its life. Going all out to keep the Republican Right from gaining the presidency and carrying out its top agenda item: Total destruction of the labor movement.

The above article is reprinted from the blog laborlou.com.

Photo: "The Guardian" or "Authority of Law" statue by James Earle Frasier in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington. Mark Fischer // CC 2.0

Soaring college costs, soaring student debt: a dysfunctional system

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 14:42:00 +0000

The depressed state in which many students find themselves while glancing into their bank accounts is relieved by the promise of opportunity in the private sector? If this promise is legitimate, as many Americans believe, than the topic of conversation in the mainstream media should not be the student-loan crisis, but rather the usefulness of a well-educated worker. But the fact is that many graduates are failing to find work, and this should be taken very seriously. So, too, should an examination of why our economic values restrain employment opportunity.

Does a student-loan crisis not suggest that recent graduates and current students alike struggle to a find path to debt repayment? Perhaps no path is being offered. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 26% of graduates are unemployed and 37% are what is called mal-employed, meaning the jobs they currently have do not require a college degree, i.e., waiting tables, working in retail - minimum wage jobs. In other words, over 60% of the most recently educated minds in America have no immediate way of paying off their loans. More disturbing yet are the disclosures these percentages fail to include:

"In May, 2.1 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially
unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals
were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a
job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they
had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey." (BLS May 2014 summary)

Its central point underlines the fact that many graduates have lost hope - no longer bidding for a part in the general workforce. Though the Obama administration has recently taken steps to combat the burdensome student debt by reducing monthly payments on government-issued loans, most graduates are spending their first years out of college unemployed or without proper resources - rendering this "help" insignificant. Also, the federal assistance programs and reduced monthly loan payments do not affect private loans issued by banks - which for most students make up the largest portions of their debt.

The average student-loan debt, according to College Access and Success, is $29,400. An obvious consequence of debt is that it destroys the ability to truly invest in the economy. Graduates are dissuaded from purchasing homes, buying a new car, having children, and are even less likely to get married; the combined debt is, for most, just too much of a financial burden. This is demonstrated in studies published by The Wall Street Journal as well as other arms of the business press. Because of the demands that debt entails, essential economic activities are suspended. This forces our economy to work against itself - contradicting the "free market" principles on which it is allegedly based. Students and graduates are corralled by crippling debt into making financial decisions out of necessity rather than out of desire. They aren't purchasing homes, investing in their future or focusing on community involvement. The debt insists that they work for money, rather than for societal improvement.

But student debt is of course encouraged by the business community. It is enforced and engineered in such a way that if students try to avoid this debt altogether, they wind up segregated to lower wages. For example, some students try to pay for college piecemeal - only taking classes when they can "afford" them. Those who take this path are not earning the salaries that derive from having a college degree. Instead they are working low-paid jobs in stores, restaurants and so on. If students pay for their food, car insurance, gas, rent, etc., and have money left over to pay for a college class, then they are just sustaining themselves, rather than getting ahead. Fragmenting the cost of tuition in this manner also only prolongs their degree: a four-year degree takes maybe six years; a six-year degree may take eight. This means students are shackled to low-paying jobs for longer periods of time - again, working these jobs out of necessity rather than desire. This is the only alternative to student-loan debt.

It could be argued that this is the smartest direction for students to take, but look at the impact on the economy. Spreading tuition payments out over several years slows economic growth, and those who do take this path still face mal-employment. The unemployment levels reported by the Labor Bureau take all graduates into account, regardless of how they managed to pay for college.

Colleges, even public ones, are operating like businesses. And like all businesses, they are adapting themselves to whatever brings a profit. As soon as students gain some kind of financial assistance, they find that the cost of tuition is increased. This situation is only defended by those advocating "free markets." It's an expression of the overall "market" philosophy innate to the American brand of capitalism. If there is a market that can be lawfully exploited through this economic system, then it will be. Colleges are one prime example. The government, instead of setting and regulating tuition costs, allows the "free market" to determine the price of higher education and thereby determine the country's direction. By handing out billions of dollars in loans to students, it only perpetuates the problem. This dysfunctional system is not debated in mainstream media.

Our government does have the collective responsibility of understanding, as Jefferson did, that higher education is, indeed, a worthwhile undertaking. Through investing in education, our country has invested billions in the quality of workers it produces. Yet the corporatization of the university has perverted government initiative for the sake of larger profits. Unless college institutions are nationalized or tuition costs heavily regulated, colleges will have no reason to lower their prices. Asking a business to reduce costs just for the sake of doing it is hardly incentive. When universities are given free rein to impose whatever costs they like, they charge the public as much as possible.

The crisis of college costs and student debt is a reflection of capitalism's inherent tendencies, which poke at the wounds of an already injured economy. Unfortunately capitalism's romanticized portrayal in the mainstream media protects it from any real criticism. If we are going to discuss ways in which we might go about fixing this problem, then the legitimacy of our current economic system and its values must also be challenged.

Charles Stevens is a writer and recent college graduate in Tennessee.

Image: marsmettnn tallahassee CC

Worth repeating: July 4th should inspire us toward third revolution

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 10:04:00 +0000

Nine years ago we published a still-relevant editorial about the Fourth of July. It was titled "Toward a third revolution."

What we said then bears repeating:

"The American Revolution, which July 4 celebrates, freed the American colonies from the yoke of the British king and empire. It established the beginnings of a democratic republic, which enshrined the rights of individuals and the idea that "the people," not kings nor queens, not churches nor religious leaders, would govern. With all its shortcomings - keeping slavery intact, stealing Native Americans' land, restricting the voting franchise to property-owning white men - it nevertheless represented a leap forward for humanity, and inspired millions.

"Like all revolutions, that American Revolution was not complete. It took many more struggles and shedding of blood - by the slaves themselves, free African Americans and abolitionists of all races, pursuing the undying dream of freedom - before slavery was ended by the Civil War. That second American Revolution liberated millions of people and swept in a new era of democracy for all through Reconstruction.

"Since the betrayal and demise of Reconstruction, countless ongoing battles have been waged to defend and enrich the gains won by these two revolutions. The heroic fighters against fascism and lynchings, for unions, for women's rights, the courageous warriors of the civil rights movement, all are among the millions who helped to push our revolutionary traditions forward.

"But reactionary forces - powerful corporations in the first place - have always opposed democratic progress. The ruling class, entrenched in the system of exploitation and profit, has a stake in keeping the status quo and even rolling back many democratic rights gained."

Nine years ago, we noted that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Republican right-wingers, "a powerful enemy of democratic rights, the ultra-right, the most reactionary sector of the ruling class," were embedded in both the White House and Congress. At that time, the battle to take back the White House was an urgent democratic task. And a huge victory was won in 2008 with the election the first African American president, Barack Obama.

But the battle against the far-right continued, and even escalated with the formation of the extreme racist and reactionary tea party movement that has now taken over the Republican Party and has a major grip on Congress. This week's Supreme Court rulings show we still face a mammoth struggle against far-right "free market," anti-worker, anti-women policies. The fight for democracy is as important and urgent now as it ever has been, part of the struggle for a country that puts people and nature before profits. That's why, for starters, everyone should put a priority on defeating the right in this fall's elections.

It's timely to say again what we said nine years ago:

"This July 4 let's take inspiration from those who came before us, and renew our commitment to defeat these enemies of progress. Let's look toward a third American Revolution, which will fulfill the promises of the first two by forever ending exploitation, building upon individual and collective rights that have been so hard-won."

Photo: A National Park Ranger gives a presentation on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. James Walsh CC